Memory overload, by Digit’s longest-serving editor
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I remember June 2001 very distinctly!
SurveyDigit had a predecessor (that shall not be named), which started in 1998, a partnership between a German and an Indian publisher. In 2001, that partnership crumbled and Digit was launched. My local newspaper stall handed Digit to me, insisting it was much better than its predecessor – “A likely story”, I thought, given that he wanted to continue my monthly business. He wasn’t lying; Digit was the technology revolution that India needed.
Unlike its predecessor, which felt like it was trying too hard to be international, Digit was unabashedly Indian. With stories about email in vernacular languages, discussions about custom fees on imported tech, headlines in Hinglish… it felt at home on an Indian newsstand – even if the price was still international! Back then ₹100 was a very steep price, given that my shared room in Bandra, Mumbai, cost ₹1,000 a month! I had to actually skip a few meals every week to save up for my Digit fix!
If I’m being honest, I only read the magazine in the second week of June 2001, because the CDs were like manna from heaven in a bandwidth-starved nation! If any OG subscribers are reading this, they’re violently nodding their heads in agreement, and shuddering at the memory of the nightmarishly slow download speeds of 2001!
What I absolutely loved about that first issue of Digit was the letters section – filled with hate mail from subscribers who had been informed of the rebrand a month in advance. Instead of brushing it under the carpet, here was a magazine sharing hate mail from its own subscribers! It was ballsy, and it was the attitude that would be associated with Digit forever. The message was simple: “Here’s all the hate mail we got; now read the magazine that follows and be prepared to eat humble pie!”
I’d find out later that while common sense would have suggested that, at least for the first issue, Digit put out a reduced print run. If the hate mail from subscribers were anything to go by, any MBA-qualified decision maker worth their salt would have halved the print run! Not the geeks at Digit; they increased the print run from 100,000 to 120,000! And thus was born the belief that Digit, ‘Your technology navigator’, would always do the impossible!
When I joined Digit in Jan 2003, right until I moved on in March 2023, doing the impossible was demanded of me, and was what I demanded of my colleagues. There’s a good reason why people who used to work at Digit are thriving at the biggest tech companies in India and abroad – you had to be special to withstand the constant demand for excellence!
I’ll illustrate the Digit ethos by recounting another anecdote from 2005 that old subscribers will happily confirm. In mid-2005, Digit wanted to upgrade at least one of the CDs to a DVD, because games and software sizes were ballooning. However, polling and market research showed that DVD-ROM drives were struggling to take off in India! Again, anyone sane would kick the idea of a Digit DVD down the road a few years, when market penetration improved. Not Digit! We decided the market needed to change, and we’d be the ones to do it!
Digit’s marketing team approached a few brands, pitching the ambitious idea, asking them to reduce the landed price of DVD-ROM and DVD-Writer drives by massively scaling up numbers. Our conservative estimates were between 5,000 and 10,000 drives would be sold, and we got laughed at! Who could blame them? Brands were selling just a few dozen a month across the country at this time!
Convinced that people would want a DVD-ROM drive if they actually had a regular source of DVD content, we offered to take on all of the logistics for participating brands in return for a big discount on MRP. The Digit DVD was launched with an offer of a massively discounted DVD-ROM or DVD-Writer drive, and if memory serves (cut me some slack, it was 21 years ago!), a bundle offer of a free DVD-ROM drive with a three- or five-year subscription to Digit.
The chaos that ensued was legendary! In just a few weeks, every single DVD-ROM drive in India had been sold to a Digit reader! Stock was being pulled off shelves in Singapore and a few other APAC locations to feed the ravenous appetite of Indians who wanted to install the latest software and games from the Digit DVD. By the end of 2005, over 90% of Digit’s 230,000 readership had a DVD-ROM drive! And almost all of that inventory was shipped through Digit’s office with logistics working around the clock!
I could share a hundred more stories like this! Stories about meeting so many of you across the country, thrashing you in Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament at SKOAR! Expos, blowing up a one-of-a-kind R&D motherboard from Intel in a failed liquid nitrogen overclock session, countless all-nighters spent on insane projects and PC builds, stealing IT passwords to install the Digit Forum without permission, playing practical jokes on readers and (whitehat) phishing 20,000 Gmail passwords, crashing BlackBerry’s servers by stress-testing BBM group chats with 10,000 readers…
Digit has had a massive impact on India using the universal language of technology; but you know that already. You wouldn’t be reading this unless you also valued the special bond you have with this brilliant brand, and appreciated what it’s done over the past 25 years!
I feel privileged to have been a part of Digit’s history, and now that I’m back to being a reader (is follower more accurate these days?) I’m excited to see the new heights Digit will scale in the next 25 years!
